MilkyWay: Is the galaxy perpetual (thread)?

The Collatz outage forced me to get serious about making the MW ATI app run without having to babysit it. In Win 7 it takes running the v9.9 ATI drivers and making sure that either GPU-Z or MSI Afterburner actually reports the driver version as 8.14.10.0697. In the case of the Radeon 4770, Win 7 will want to install an "HD 4770 update". Doing this is fine but then you have to run the v9.9 driver install afterward. It works and is 100% stable on my 4 boxes (3 - 64bit and 1 - 32bit) if CCC is NOT included as part of the driver install.

Never could get the ATI MW running well in XP64. It runs in XP32 as a dedicated box but if you breath on it the client causes a video reset and stops crunching. Some report success with Vista and I would think the instructions would be the same as Win 7.

Originally posted by Beyond:Some report success with Vista and I would think the instructions would be the same as Win 7.

What you said

I've had no issues getting the newest app to run on Vista or Win7 64 bit, CCC installed or not using Cat 9.9 (9.10 on the 5870 box). The video reset does seem to be more of an issue with MW than with Collatz however if you're going to actually use the box while it's crunching. The 5870 doesn't have any issue in this regard, but both my dual 5850 box and a 4870 seem pretty touchy. If they're left alone however they work fine.

Did you try the ones that are touchy without CCC? Make sure too that the driver actually reports as 8.14.10.0697. I installed v9.9 several times and sometimes it still reports a lower version (0676 or 0685), in which case the box is touchy and has video resets in MW (but not in Collatz).

Originally posted by Beyond:Did you try the ones that are touchy without CCC? Make sure too that the driver actually reports as 8.14.10.0697. I installed v9.9 several times and sometimes it still reports a lower version (0676 or 0685), in which case the box is touchy and has video resets in MW (but not in Collatz).

They aren't in daily use, so as long as I leave them alone, they're fine. Don't fix what's not broken and all that

Alright. I'm trying to get this going with a 4770, but I'm just getting computation errors. I'm currently running Catalyst 9.11 on win 7 x64, no CCC and I've downloaded the Milkyway ATI app, .19f, from here. Restarted BOINC, but get computation errors across the board for all 48 downloaded WUs. MW website error out is this:

Originally posted by frazamatazzle:Alright. I'm trying to get this going with a 4770, but I'm just getting computation errors. I'm currently running Catalyst 9.11 on win 7 x64, no CCC and I've downloaded the Milkyway ATI app, .19fOne thing I would like to try is to run an earlier Catalyst a la 9.9, but I have had no luck finding old drivers for anything but XP on the ATI site.

Anyone <coughbeyondcough> got any pointers?

You should be using the v0.20b version, faster and better running, a world of difference:

Edit: MW is in the process of converting to DA's new credit system. I can't imagine that'll be good, so I'm hitting it while it's still awarding decent credits. We're WAY behind in the project and if the credits nosedive we're stuck

I'm all set on my end. (Silly me, turns out the link to the old Catalyst drivers on AMD is there or not there depending on which way you navigate to what otherwise looks like the same download page) Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes as soon as MW site is back up.

Hmmm. WUs download, but never start now. Even if I suspend everything but MW. I tried messing with cc_config too (this is an i7, so I added ncpus 9 and ngpus 0) and then unmessing with it. Exited all boinc processes then retarted. Reset the project. Bumped the priority on the MW site to be equal to or better than any other project and then updated the project. WUs just won't run.

Good to see it's running. There is only 1 type of WU on MW. It gives the standard, BOINC approved credit amount for CPUs. It's just that the work is of the type (double precision math and a task that can be effectively parallelized) that runs particularly well on the higher end ATI GPUs. WUs that take hours on a CPU take only seconds on a GPU with hundreds or even thousands of "cores" working in parallel.

Originally posted by Calphor:I cannot even get MilkyWay to send any WUs to my machine. I've tried resetting, detaching, manually configuring the MW client. It just sits there. Oh well. I kind of like crunching RC5-72 anyway.

Did you try this:

Make sure your MW preferences are set:

Use GPUs for Computation? yesUse CPU for Computation? no

Put the app_info.xml back to default.Did that do it?

Also as frazamatazzle points out above, set it to use the GPU while computer is in use.

You'll most likely have to have all other GPUs projects suspended to get MW WUs. It's because of the tiny cache allowed by the project. There's a thread about it here. Ignore the Brian S posts:

I finally got some to download, but when they run on the ATI card, I get massive screen artifacts after about 15 secs, then the WUs back off to the CPU. I guess it just doesn't like my combo. I'll keep running what I have been for a while. Thanks for help!

I noticed that the CPU and GPU WUs increased markedly over last weekend - although I also seem to get the original, smaller CPU WUs as well.

I've never had problems with the CPU WUs (of either size) and I had some initial success with the smaller GPU WUs on my nVidia GTX275 (under WinXP Pro) over the weekend - they crunched successfully in about 4 minutes - but the larger ones, whilst still crunching successfully (in about 16 mins) are coming up with "invalid" results on the MW@Home results page.

Hmm, "Odd" I thought - so I tried a few more and still had no luck. So now I've gone back to only crunching CPU WUs (and back to using my GTX275 for GPUGrid).

What are your experiences with CPU/GPU WUs - may depend on whether you are using an nVidia or ATI graphics card as well.

I noticed that the CPU and GPU WUs increased markedly over last weekend - although I also seem to get the original, smaller CPU WUs as well.

Hi Dave. The size was increased 4x to decrease the server load. It has indeed achieved that.

quote:

I've never had problems with the CPU WUs (of either size) and I had some initial success with the smaller GPU WUs on my nVidia GTX275 (under WinXP Pro) over the weekend - they crunched successfully in about 4 minutes - but the larger ones, whilst still crunching successfully (in about 16 mins) are coming up with "invalid" results on the MW@Home results page.

Hmm, "Odd" I thought - so I tried a few more and still had no luck. So now I've gone back to only crunching CPU WUs (and back to using my GTX275 for GPUGrid).

What are your experiences with CPU/GPU WUs - may depend on whether you are using an nVidia or ATI graphics card as well.

Dave

There are no CPU and GPU WUs as such. All WUs are the same. Here's my take on the MW situation: the CPU and NVidia apps are written by the MW staff. They're not so swift at programming. It sounds like there's problem in the CUDA code that causes the crash on the new longer WUs. The ATI app is written by CP (aka Gipsel on Collatz) who is a far far far better programmer than the MW guys. He tried to help them with the other apps but they don't seem to care. That's one of the reasons that the ATI app is so much faster (the other is that the ATI cards are better at double precision math, which MW uses). He (along with Slicker from Collatz) also sent them all the info needed to update their server software and they haven't bothered to do that either. DA is involved on the fringes of the project and some of them seem to have absorbed his arrogant, user despising attitude. Too bad. The BOINC programmers have a similar problem. DA calls all the shots and if they don't bow very low, they're out the door. SETI has the same problem and you can see what a mess they have over there

MilkyWay just released a new NVidia version (v.23) that solves their CUDA problem, although some say it hogs the video on non dedicated machines. v.24 is due out within the next day in order to fix that problem...

Well, I'm dropping MW for now to focus on Collatz now that I have 2M. Hopefully when I come back my 4870x2 will play better with MW as I've gotten VPU recoveries and even driver related crashes with MW running.

Originally posted by jockess:Has anyone found the magic driver version on WinXP 32 bit that will allow this to run on ATI cards without the video driver resetting after 30-45 seconds or so?

The best I ever found was ATI v9.8 without CCC. If you have CCC installed, it has to be uninstalled before installing the v9.8 driver only. Even then, MW will only run well if the machine is left alone. Doing anything else will probably cause a video reset. The XP video drivers are buggy (or maybe XP itself). Win7 (also vista I believe) does not have the problem and all the newer driver versions work well. Even with Win7 I do NOT install CCC. MSI Afterburner does a good job of controlling the fans and GPU settings.

For people running XP: word on the MW forums is that the ATI v9.12 drivers have finally fixed the XP video reset bug in both XP32 and XP64. Haven't tried them as my ATI machines are Win7, but give v9.12 a try and please post your experience.

Got the 6th 4770 online today. So far have all of them splitting work between MW and Collatz. Should I be emphasizing one over the other right now? There's more upside in MW but we don't want to be losing places in Collatz either; although holding off PoorBoy & company is probably a lost cause...

Originally posted by jockess:Has anyone found the magic driver version on WinXP 32 bit that will allow this to run on ATI cards without the video driver resetting after 30-45 seconds or so?

Any updates to this? I get the WUs to run for about an hour or so, then the machine locks up. I've tried installing Catalyst 10.2 (nonCCC), upgrading to BOINC 6.10.36, using an app_info.xml, not using one. I get the same issue. Any help would be appreciated.